If you haven't had a chance to read through The Tech Report's breakdown of AMD's Financial Analyst Day and the speech that the new CEO Rory Read gave. Rory replaced long time CEO Dirk Meyer at the helm of AMD after the large shake up AMD underwent late in 2011 and this was one of his first chances to describe his vision for AMD and the market in 2012. He spend a fair amount of time on low power processors and ultramobile form factors, describing his vision of AMD outflanking Intel at that market segment. With a history of lower pricing and recent low power processor families, he sees Brazos as a much better alternative than Intel's Ultrabook and especially the anemic Atom line. He also discussed ARM, not only as a possible future competitor for what used to be be AMD and Intel's exclusive turf as well as possible future competition for AMD's planned SoC products. Read on for more.

"AMD has a new management team and a new direction. They recently shared their vision for the company's future, and we were there, listening and then chatting with new CTO Mark Papermaster. Read on for our report."

One of the many interesting bits of information AMD disseminated at this years FAD started some conjecture about possible problems with Piledriver. It seems that somewhere along the line AMD dropped a module on the Seou chip bringing its core count down from 10 to 8. Once the hue and cry died down a bit a theory propounded by SemiAccurate offered a sensible theory for the change. It seems likely that AMD initially developed this family of chips with the belief that DDR4 would have made it to market by now, perhaps in compensation for the delay in adopting DDR3. Unfortunately DDR4 is nowhere to be seen outside of testing laboratories which has had an effect on AMD's development plans. Without new memory there is no extra memory bandwidth which will in turn starve the extra cores on the chip and likely slow the performance of all of the cores. Instead AMD opted to trim out the extra cores and as a benefit they get to utilize their existing sockets as opposed to introducing another one.

"A lot of people are in a tizzy because AMD (NYSE:AMD) has changed the upcoming Seoul CPU from 10 to 8 cores. The general responses ranges from AMD incompetence to apocalypse, but all it really signals is a lack of technical understanding on their behalf.

The slide in question was the server roadmap we wrote up here. It introduces Piledriver cored Abu Dhabi and Seoul chips, successors to the Bulldozer based Interlagos and Valencia respectively. The base part has 4 modules/8 cores, and the bigger variant is two of those in a package. The big controversy is that they were supposed to be 5 module/10 core parts."

Consider this fair warning: tomorrow here at PC Perspective you will learn the future of AMD. Sound over dramatic? We don't think so. After a pretty interesting year in 2011 for the company and AMD has said on several occasions that this year's Financial Analyst Day was going to reveal a lot about what the future holds for them on the GPU, CPU and APU front.

Hopefully we will learn what AMD plans to do after the cancelation of the second-generation of ultra lower power APUs, how important discrete graphics will be going forward and what life there is for the processor architecture after Bulldozer.

We will be in Sunnyvale at the AMD campus covering the event and we will be holding a live blog at the same time...right here. The event starts at 9am PST on February 2nd, aso be sure you set your calendars and bookmark this page for all the news!!